Len Deighton - Spy Hook

'Never mind the wine, What's the real story?'

He dabbed his lips with a dinner napkin and said, 'Zena's uncle has a wonderful collection of very old books and crucifixes, icons and things…' He looked at me. I stared back at him and said nothing. Werner amended it to, 'Maybe he buys them… I'm not sure.'

'And maybe he's not her uncle,' I suggested.

'Oh, I think he's her… Well, yes maybe an old friend. Yes, sometimes he buys these things from Poles who come into East Germany looking for work. Bibles mostly: seventeenth-century. He's an expert on early Christian art.'

'And Zena smuggles them back to the West, and they are sold in those elegant shops in Munich where orthodontists go to furnish their Schlosser.'

Werner wasn't listening. 'Zena doesn't understand how they work,' he said lugubriously.

'How who work?'

'The Stasi. If she goes calling, the way Frank has told her to, they'll just follow her day after day to see where she goes. But Zena won't realize that. The whole lot of them will go into the bag. They'll accuse her of stealing State art treasures or something.'

'The People's art treasures,' I corrected him. 'Yes, well they won't like the idea of her exporting antiques without a licence.' I tried to make it sound like a minor misdeed, a technical infraction of a customs regulation. 'But Frank wouldn't know anything about that, of course.'

Without answering Werner got up and went to the tiny kitchen. He came back with the half-empty bottle of Meursault and a wineglass for himself. He poured more wine for me and some for himself too and put the bottle on the table, having put a coaster into position for it. I watched him drink. He pulled a face like a small child asked to swallow some nasty medicine. Werner knew a lot about wine but he always treated it like sour grape juice. 'Suppose Frank knew all about Zena and the antique books?' Werner said slowly and carefully. 'After all, Frank is supposed to be running an intelligence service, isn't he?'

'Yes,' I said, ignoring the sarcasm.

'And suppose Frank had reason to believe that by delivering poor Zena to the Stasi he'd get them to lay off his Bizet people. Maybe let them get away?'

I said nothing. I sipped my wine and tried to conceal my thoughts. Then bloody good for Frank, I thought. But it all sounded highly unlikely. I suspected that Frank was still too fond of Zena to throw her to the wolves. But if he'd worked out some bizarre deal that got two or three of our people off the hook, in exchange for a ring of cheap crooks who were running a racket involving religious antiques, books, and God knows what else, stuff that might well have been stolen in the first place, then good for Frank. I would be all in favour of a deal like that. So I said nothing.

'Don't forget it's Zena,' said Werner.

No, don't forget it's Zena. That would make a swop like that a real public benefit. 'No,' I said. 'It's her I'm thinking about.'

'He's a bloody Judas,' said Werner. He drank some more wine but seemed no more happy with the taste of it than he was the first time.

'Have you got any reason to think so?' I asked.

'I feel it in my guts,' said Werner in a voice I didn't recognize.

'Frank wouldn't do a thing like that,' I said, more to calm Werner than because I completely believed it. Frank liked Zena but Frank could be ruthless: I knew it and so did Werner. And so, if she had any brains, did the wretched Zena.

'Yes, Frank would!' snapped Werner. 'It's just the sort of thing he would do. It's the sort of thing the English are notorious for. You know that.'

'Perfidious Albion?' I said.

He didn't think that was funny. He didn't answer or even look at me. He just sat there with his face tight, his eyes watery and his big hands clenched together so tightly that the knuckles whitened.

I'd never seen him in such a state before. Whether it was concern for Zena or a burning hatred for Frank, it was eating him up. I watched him biting his lip with rage and I worried about him. I'd seen men wound up this tight before; and I'd seen them snap. 'I'll see what I can do,' I said, but it was too late for such offers.

Through gritted teeth Werner said, 'First thing tomorrow morning I'm going to the office. I'll find the D-G and make him do something. Make him!'

'I wouldn't advise that, Werner,' I said anxiously. 'No, Werner, I really wouldn't.' The idea of this black-bearded Werner shouting and struggling in the lobby of London Central with the redoubtable Sergeant-Major Gaskell trying to subdue him, and the questions that would inevitably be directed at me in consequence, was something I didn't care to contemplate. I tipped the rest of the Meursault into my glass. It was warm; I suppose he'd not put the bottle back into the refrigerator. All in all, Thursday was not a good day.

I have always been a light sleeper: it's a part of the job. But it wasn't the low rumble of the motorcycle that awakened me – they come roaring past at all hours of the night – it was the silence that followed its engine being switched off. By the time the garden gate clicked I was fully awake. I heard the footsteps – high heel boots on the stone paving – and I rolled out of bed before the brief ring of the doorbell awakened Gloria.

'Three thirty!' I heard Gloria say sleepily as I went out of the bedroom. She sounded surprised; she had a lot to learn about the demands the Department made on its middle management. I went downstairs two steps at a time, to answer it before Doris and the children were disturbed. But before I got to the bottom of the stairs the caller tried again: more insistent this time, two long rings.

'Okay okay okay,' I said irritably.

'Sorry governor, I thought you hadn't heard.' The caller was a tall thin young man dressed entirely in shiny black leather like some apparition from a bad dream. 'Mr Samson?' Over his arm he had a black shiny helmet, and there was a battered leather pouch slung from his neck.

'Yes?'

'Have you got something to identify yourself, sir?' he said, without saying what I was supposed to produce. That was the way regulations said it should be done, but I'd got used to a more vernacular style from the messengers I knew.

So it was a new man. 'What about this?' I said and, from behind the half-open door, I brought the Mauser 9-mm into view.

He grinned, 'Yeah, I reckon that'll do,' he said. He opened the pouch and from it took one of the large buff envelopes that the Department uses to circulate its bad news.

'Samson, B,' I said just to get him off the hook. 'Any verbal?'

'You're to open it right away. That's all.'

'Why not,' I said. 'I'll need something to help me back to sleep.'

'Goodnight, governor. Sorry to disturb you.'

'Next time,' I said, 'don't ring the bell. Just breathe heavily through the letter-box.'

'What is it, darling?' asked Gloria, coming downstairs slowly like a chorus girl in a Busby Berkeley musical. She was not fully awake. Blonde hair disarranged, she was dressed in the big fluffy white Descamps bathrobe that I'd bought her for Christmas. She looked wonderful.

'A messenger.' I tore open the big brown envelope. Inside there was an airline ticket from London Heathrow to Los Angeles International by the flight that left at nine am – that is to say in less than six hours time – and a note, curt and typed on office paper bearing the usual rubber stamps:

Dear Bernard,

You'll be met on arrival. Sorry about the short notice but the Washington office works five hours later than we do, and someone there arranged with the Deputy that this one should be down to you, and only you,

Yours apologetically,

Harry (N.D.O. Ops.)

I recognized the sprawling handwriting. So poor old Harry Strang was still on the roster for night duty in Operations. I suppose he must have felt sorry for himself too for he'd scribbled on the bottom of the note 'Some people have all the luck!' I suppose for someone sitting up all night in Operations and listening to the rain, the prospect of immediate transportation to sunny California must have seemed attractive.